


the lesser days

by Glossolalia



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Analysis, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, Internal Conflict, Love Letters, M/M, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 09:16:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11399583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glossolalia/pseuds/Glossolalia
Summary: During Shiro's imprisonment, Keith writes letters to cope with the grieving process of not only losing a friend but acknowledging love postmortem.





	the lesser days

**Author's Note:**

> mini playlist.
> 
> solitude / m83  
> fought for me (acoustic) / paradise fears  
> higher / naked and famous  
> i love you always forever / betty who

It's corny, isn't it? Writing love letters, that is.

Keith supposes the only thing that could make writing freehanded letters to the one he loves cornier is if said loved one was dead, and well, Keith's karma is king of making situations sadder than what's necessary. In fact, Keith considers the state of things damn near masturbatory on providence's part, but that doesn't stop him from sitting down to write the letters.

He doesn't know why he starts.

Loneliness, probably. See: definitely.

The only saving grace about this blatant grieving process is that he writes the letters on stationery stolen from a shoddy motel called Buffalo Inn some two-hundred and fifty miles south. He'd used his minimal government stipend on a cathartic road trip two months after realizing Shiro was dead in that infinite way people pretend death isn't. The realization had boomed through him, and to be honest, hadn't stopped ringing since that Tuesday morning that would forever only mean anything to him.

The paper's rusty minimalist border and 1980s graphic of the sun sinking behind a doodled covered wagon not only made Keith raise an eyebrow but also, take his words less serious.  

> _I should have told you when you asked me if I had last words. I think you were fishing for me to say something, anything, first. You were polite. You've always been polite. You didn't push the envelope for the Kerberos Mission when it was placed into your hands and then tossed onto your desk. I'm sorry that was me._
> 
> _I think we're all in my head. I hope we were all in my head._

Words like that.

Tiredly structured sentences woven through signals thrumming beneath the cracked desert floor Keith hopes aren't in his head because that would mean he's fucking lost it. According to Galaxy Garrison, that happened a hundred and seventy-two days ago when he pounded his foot onto a metal chair and flung himself at a student for calling him Shiro's 'widowed cocksucker,' but that's a moot point. Something tells him there's a difference between being out of one's mind versus being lost in it, and he's lost.

God, he's lost. 

> _I keep thinking about the meat thing. The human packaging thing and what it even means without people there to hold it accountable, and I don't think I understand how people always expect us to forget. I'm not forgetting, and I keep sitting in my dad's rocking chair. I wonder if he did this when Mom disappeared. I wonder if he sat in this same spot, looked at the stars and tried to find meaning in them when he was alone. There's room to say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but I've never seen any branches._

He reckons he'll get over it.

People die, and that's a fact of life he's known all too well since he started building complex cognitive thought, but that fact is rarely followed by the less dignified aspects of mourning. Examples of this being crying while sucking back government cheese coated ramen noodles and watching cheap porn. The latter happened to try and inspire any feeling, but Keith, unfortunately, comprehended his error when he realized he'd jerked off to thoughts of a dead man. Postcoital self-loathing had never hit him half as hard.

He sticks to writing love letters after that.

> _Too young to know, you know? We were both too young to know and imagine what would happen, but there were split-seconds when I looked at you and understood why people want to get married, I think. Too soon, too. You were my first adult feelings, and I want to be angrier about how this leaves a mark. It's going to be more baggage, and I'm not going to be the same person. I'm tired of how nothing stays the same, and I wish I didn't consciously see how things change me or how you changed me._

Throughout the year, he fills the stationery pad. Some pages are fuller than others, manic scribbles in his garish chicken scratch. There are words of devotion that gust across undertones of bitterness and a sense of failure. In between writing letters and taking long rides across the canyon's lips, Keith follows the energy rising from Earth's core. In many ways, it's the only thing that shows him life can still be effervescent, and with the wind whipping through the bangs of tied back hair, he careens. He follows the spiders that descend from his heart.

> _I don't think I'm going to be okay as soon as I wanted to be._

It's an internal scream, but it's also hands that drag from his shoulders and up along the sides of his throat. The need to cry out and violently fling things across his private space has been lost to who he was before Shiro, but he requires a way to unbridle that fire inside. He realizes he needs purpose and not charred framework, but the only things that get him out of bed are the stars and perilously scaling red rock in search of caverns. He's had countless sunburns along the back of his neck, and he's swallowed water hanging over a hundred-foot drop. Keith is unafraid of falling in the way that he swings above it from a single rope like a belly-up crescent.   

> _There's so much about you I wish I could emulate, and maybe I'll spend the rest of my life trying to, but there are pieces of you I never knew. There are corridors of me I caved in before you could ever explore them. You are idealism, Shiro, and it's why I hated you so much at first, but maybe the fearlessness in your head is what I needed. All or nothing, right? Don't give up on yourself because it's all you have at the end of the day, right?_
> 
> _I had you, though. I feel like a half-finished construction site, but what if that's just living? What if you're always undone, and we mistakenly thought being a whole person was possible? What if we do need other people to feel whole, and we're getting it all wrong by acting like understanding love outside ourselves before we understand it inside ourselves is wrong? I don't know now, Shiro. I don't think you knew either._
> 
> _Fuck this past tense._

On a lesser day, Keith finds the Blue Lion cave paintings.

At first, he thinks he's losing his mind, again, but at that point, Keith doesn't see his fracturing sense of reality as all that intriguing. Aside from the girl at the general store fifteen miles out, he's had almost zero human interaction since being booted from Galaxy Garrison. When he talks to the teller at the bank or thinks to pay his insurance on the phone, he finds his voice strange, startling. It's deeper, raspier, and imperfect, but he somehow knows himself better than he ever has in the way that he's all he now knows.

He takes pictures of the lions, feet aimlessly scuffing across the rocky ground, but he still avoids stomping a mother scorpion and her children cargo.

"What is this?" he asks no one. God, maybe.

Does he even believe in God? That's sure a question for another day, but all signs point to 'no.' The self-loathing kind of 'no' where Keith rightfully feels entitled to his pain.

He rests a gloved set of fingers beneath the paws and furrows his brow, trying to understand what he's looking at without pre-existing anthropological knowledge. The sun is setting, and he doesn't have much time if he wants to make it home without a broken ankle, but he's suddenly experiencing a familiar sensation that injects him with nostalgia. Has he been there before?

Logically, there's no way, but Keith loves a gut instinct.

Lions are a point of pride, which he knows well, but this lion is more than pride.

If the walls hadn't cried out for him to stay put, then he might have reported the site. The 'might' because he's never particularly enjoyed disruption be it with himself or the planet.

Though there's a great sense of purpose seared throughout that numinous cavern, nothing more comes of it. In his low-lit shack, Keith churns through collected data over and over, seeking out patterns in the constellations that might mirror the rock formations below or the haphazardly drawn maps on his work table. While he searches for what Shiro meant to him in the grand scheme of his then deflated spirit, Keith also dissects what it means when the universe is elbow deep in your chest cavity, asking your innards the hard questions. Is it trying to fix him? Is it trying to tell him there's purpose in not just systematics but everything?

To go from the greatest pilot of his generation to just Keith requires the unfurling Keith has only seen when acrobats wrap themselves up in silk scarves and suddenly let go with a spin. It's having faith that you can be you without snapping your neck in front of an audience. It's knowing you can go unhinged and that your singular humanity is more than every label you've worked to acquire.

> _I don't think you taught me that I could fail, but I think I've failed, and I'm teaching myself that it's okay._

He doesn't reread the letters. Keith folds them in threes, seals them with several pieces of clear tape, and then lets the letters fill a time-eaten box wearing water stains. It used to carry his dad's long-since confiscated files about the Garrison. Filling its stripped insides with something private and significant feels like he's killing two birds with one stone. He's reclaiming both what the Garrison took from his father and him.  

> _This morning I told myself to stop searching for the source of the feeling this place gives me. I want to accept mourning is nonlinear, and when I feel that thing, it's my mind telling me I miss you. I miss you every single day. I miss you, and you've been gone long enough for me to say I'm fucking mad at you for going. You knew everyone else in my life went, and you had to go, too. I wish I knew why, Shiro. I want to know why. It feels like I killed you when all I wanted was what was best for you. You're the first person I put before myself._

Telling yourself everything happens for a reason sits like a coping mechanism to Keith, but sometimes, he second guesses his practical notions and wants to believe it could be true.

Keith fears that if he tells himself it's true, then every person who has died or left him would somehow be exonerated in the name of himself. He's not selfish enough to want that. Keith isn't self-important enough to seek destiny through the absence of others, and he doesn't know it then, but someday, that idea will be his greatest mountain to climb. As it stands, the concept is too massive for him to be okay with.

He wants to fill the world with the sweet carnation smell of oil so that it'll properly run. He'd rather be a part of its operating core. He doesn't want to be that person who uses bodies to make it somewhere, especially since Shiro's death has taught him the only somewhere people truly have is what's inside their heads.

Sometimes he hears Shiro's words: "Patience yields focus."

If he's patient enough, then will he be able to focus on moving on? Does it apply to more than the reels of simulator footage?

"I'm being patient, but I can't move."

There are days when the weeds creep over Keith, and he rests chest-down on the front porch. It is hot. The kind of hotness that's arid and turns his torso into a house for red coals, but he doesn't mind that. What he does mind is how the weeds are the only goddamn thing that'll grow in his desert, and what he also minds is how they don't even know what they're doing. They sputter free from the space between his ribs and drape him in fluttering shadows, and while they do fight the violent rays, Keith wants to frantically tear them out by the root.

He would rather feel the heat.

It's better to feel the heat than sit in the shade. At first, he sought the relief of low branches, a single stripe of screening from a chance saguaro, but the shadows began to come from within. He created an internal awning.

There's a single page with ' _come back to me_ ' written a hundred and sixty-seven times over. The letters curl into the margins and vary in size and slant. Like the box, it wears stains that smudge its lines.

It's the only letter Keith tears up.

> _I love you. I can't say I loved you because I still love you, and it was never supposed to be this way. Everything that was meant to happen never even began, and it's because I was looking starward and not around me. Now there's so much Earth beneath me, Shiro. I've been looking down since the day you left. I want to look up. How do I look up again without looking for you, you, you?_

Things get better.

Under the sickle moon, Keith decides this. He decides this before it's true because he once heard that if you believe in something enough, then the world will recognize it. For a year, he's been feeding off energies and make believing configurations while fully knowing humans are a pattern recognition machines. Recursive probabilistic fractals have guided him since he dropped his single bag of belongings onto the shack's floor.

"I wonder if they'll find you," he asks the sky. He asks Shiro.

A group will someday return to Kerberos and bring Shiro home. He contemplates where he would put Shiro's ashes. After all, on some morbid attempt at sympathy, the government recognized Keith as Shiro's closest kin once they confirmed his death. Along with minuscule trinkets, the clothing Shiro left behind in his locker sits paper-bagged at the end of a futon, collecting dust as its familiar scent wanes.

With the Garrison repeal paperwork balanced on Keith's lap and his eyes boring into the desert's nighttime horizon, Keith stews in the fact that he might have found a purpose.

At the top of the document, he writes a single line. 

> _I want to bring you home._

Thoughts of Shiro's hands strumming his nerves are replaced by thoughts of personally packing the man's gaunt shell away from the Plutonian satellite. Had Shiro not softened his heart, then Keith would have become the final death throes of a star, reveling in a ten-thousand-year agony that would chase him for lifetimes.

It's the least he can do, he figures.

Keith paints the top of the form with white out and seals it like a love letter. He tosses it onto his makeshift table and grabs the stationery pad, but for a split-second, time ruptures into stillness.

Unthinking, he steps toward the shack's front window and pushes aside a ragged curtain. The outside is quiet, and the sky is a black, black ink. Unsure of what he's feeling, Keith opens and closes his fingers and furrows his brow. He decides it's nothing and lets himself outside into the cold desert air with that pen and paper in hand. Rather than sit where his dad used to, Keith settles on the edge of the porch and very slowly pushes as much air from his lungs as he can. He looks up.

Is he still lost? Of course.

He's lost, but it's the kind of lost he thinks he's okay with existing within. It's nomadic in nature, and at this point in his life, he feels unbound and readily asunder.

Keith is in the midst of contemplating his unfinished letter when an unidentifiable pod tears a bleeding red stripe across the sky. It crashes with a combustion of starry light, and at once, Keith is dazzled.

Using both hands, he reaches inside himself and begins to dig out weeds. Keith throws aside the stationery and disappears inside his house to find his bandana. He wrenches the homemade explosives out from beneath his work desk and stuffs them into his backpack.

On that final sheet of stationery sits a sentence smeared by Keith's swift movements. 

> _Why won't the universe let me stop loving you?_

The wind takes the paper by its corner, and as Keith sprints toward his hoverbike, drapes it across the surrounding desertscape like a protective membrane.


End file.
